New Projects - Fresh from the Labs

For anyone interested in the translation of hieroglyphics—or should I
say, transliteration (I'm thinking archaeologists and Tomb
Raider fans)—the
Kemet Project might be a great place to start.

Kemet comes with a series of “phonogram” hieroglyphs ready to use.

Once hieroglyphs have been dragged into place, you can get a reading in both
transliteration and phonetic form.

Type a word (minus vowels) in the left and get a series of hieroglyphs on the
right. Cool!

Installation

As far as system requirements go, aside from X, the only big dependency
I could find was Java. The rest of the installation process isn't quite as
simple. As the project is undertaking a large and daunting task,
it has been split into several parts: an API, an LF (which stands
for something—I'm not sure) and a Kemet application (which at the time of writing
was “coming soon”). Thankfully, a demo has been provided under the KemetLF
package, so head to the downloads section and grab the latest package.

Extract the new package and look inside the new folder. There should be
a file called KemetLFDEMO.zip. Extract this into a new subdirectory of
its own and look in the new directory. You should see a file called
KemtLFDEMO.jar; flag this as executable to run it. If you're using
a file manager, you should be able to do something along the lines of
right-clicking and checking “executable” in the permissions section. If
you're using a terminal, you can flag the file as executable with this
command:

$ chmod u+x KemetLFDEMO.jar

From here, if you're lucky, you can run it by clicking on the file
or entering the command:

$ ./KemetLFDEMO.jar

Usage

First, as the information window at the start points out,
this is a demo—only some of the final features are implemented. Three
windows will open: the main window, a Phonograms window that contains
hieroglyphs to drag and drop onto the main window, as well as a small
help window to explain some of the basic features.

The main window is broken into three tabs: the last is a Preferences
tab (self-explanatory), and the first two tabs are for Hieroglyphs to
Transliteration and Transliteration to Hieroglyphs, respectively.

The first tab is for dragging selected phonograms from their window
into the big writing space on the left. Once dragged, any symbols will
appear in the right two panes in both transliterated format as well as
a phonetic reading.

Open the second tab, and in the left-hand pane, you can enter your own
text in the Latin alphabet and have it appear in hieroglyphs on the
right. Pretty neat, huh? Something that alarmed me, but will amuse anyone
who's already well versed on the subject, is that there are no vowels,
only consonants. When I entered my name, it came up as “jhn”, but at
least I could see my name in hieroglyphs on the right.

Once again, I'm covering a topic I know nearly nothing about, so I'm sure
I've probably made some silly errors and given some misinformation. Still,
this project charmed the pants off me—from its enormous scope
to the small details in making the GUI elements appear as
hieroglyphic-looking characters to a sandy background for the windows and
text boxes. I hope this project makes it to full
release. Only open source could give the public a free tool like this.

I'm actually not the first person here at LJ to cover this
program.
Dave Phillips wrote about it a few months back in his excellent “News In
The Linux Audio World” column on LinuxJournal.com (great stuff by the way,
I love Dave's work).
I was so impressed with the idea, I thought it deserved
some further coverage here.

As any musician who deals with sheet music can attest, there comes the
annoying time when you have to turn the page, which means you
either have to find a way to take one hand off your instrument and keep
playing, or you simply have to stop playing and resume once the page is
turned. Either way, it's a dilemma that has existed since classical times, and it
has caused so many problems through the years that people often
are employed just to turn the page at the appropriate time (there's even a French
film called The Page Turner).

According to the VirtMus Web site:

VirtMus (virtual music) is a free application that allows the user to
display sheet music and turn pages without removing the hands (or feet)
from the instrument the music is performed on. This feature is very useful
during concerts and practice sessions as it allows the musician to focus
on performing the music without interruption. The software also allows
the users to store and organize their entire sheet music collection on
a laptop, making it fully portable and available at a click of a button.

VirtMus lets you turn musical pages easily with one button push
(ideally by foot), while you continue playing your instrument.

VirtMus also lets you make your
own notation on the pages before you play (I made those weird pink marks).

Installation

VirtMus is a cross-platform, Java-based program, and as such, the only
real requirement is a working installation of Java Runtime Environment
(JRE) 6 SE. As for the program itself, head to the download section at
the Web site and grab the latest .zip file. Extract it, and make your way
to the bin folder inside the main VirtMus directory. Here, you'll see
executables for Linux and Windows, with the Linux binary
simply named virtmus.

Depending on your file manager, you may be lucky enough to click
on the file and have it run, but don't panic if it doesn't. Simply open
a terminal inside the bin folder and enter the command:

$ ./virtmus

Usage

Once you're inside the program, you need to begin by adding a new
song. From the menu, choose Song→New Song, and you'll be prompted
for a new project filename. Enter a name and click save. Now that you have
a new song underway, you need to add some musical pages.

Look in the PlayList Window on the left, and under Default Play List in
the drop-down menu will be the name of your song. To add some musical
pages, from the menu, choose MusicPage→Add Pages. Here, you can
add either PDFs or image files. I had some problems with the musical
characters in the PDFs being rendered properly (probably just my system
though), so I converted each page to an image file and imported them
separately.

Now that you have loaded some pages, if you look inside the Thumbs Window,
you'll see a preview of the order in which pages will appear in a thumbnail
image format, which you then can modify in the playlist on the left.

The annotations window on the right is yet another piece of genius.
Here, you can make your own personal notes on the page itself (with the
added benefit of leaving the original intact), highlighting difficult
sections or notes you should pay attention to while you play. Click on a
page of notation from the playlist on the left, and the page will appear
in the Annotations Window on the right.

And, now we reach the entire point of this program, the “Go Live”
feature. Either choose View→Go Live from the menu, or press F5, and
suddenly, you'll be transported into a full-screen view of your pages, with
the first two pages you're currently viewing featured prominently
on-screen, and the next page trailing just off to the right.

To begin page turning, click the left-mouse button to move ahead,
or click the right-mouse button to go back. Numerous other buttons on the
keyboard will move the page forward, including Space, Enter, the arrow
keys, Ctrl and so on, but the only one I found for going backward was
Page Up, although I bet there's another key somewhere that I missed
in my late-night testing.

Of course, clicking a mouse or pressing something on the keyboard still
leaves you with much the same problem—you have to take a hand off the
instrument to turn the page—although it is at least in a less clumsy
format than the traditional hand-and-paper method. But fear not! The
Web site recommends using a USB footswitch, removing the need
to let go of your instrument.

However, I'm not sure how common or cheap USB footswitches are.
Being the cheapskate that I am, I'd plug in a second USB keyboard (the
cheapest I could get), remove some of the keys around the spacebar,
and then tap the spacebar with my toes. It'd look a little funny,
but a tightwad like myself wouldn't really care!

Unfortunately, VirtMus development seems to have dried up. The last
time there was any development (at least at the time of this writing) was in
2009. One motive in writing this piece was to spur the project
on to completion. I know a great many musical institutions that could
benefit from this program and to have it reach full maturity
would be fantastic.

I'm going to leave you now with the words of my fellow Linux
Journal
colleague, Dave Phillips:

Alas, development of VirtMus appears to
be stalled. The concept is cool—an affordable alternative to dedicated
digital music displays—and the source code is freely available, so
there's hope for the project's revival. And, if any of my readers happen
to step up to the challenge, please let me know. I'd be happy to update
the status of the VirtMus Project.

I'm working alongside German developer Friedemann Reinhard to bring you
this project next month. Quantum Minigolf is nearly the same as the game
Minigolf, except that the ball obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. For
instance, a ball can be at several places at once. It can diffract around
obstacles and interfere with itself. Apart from that, the rules are the
same. You can play on various tracks involving various obstacles. You
hit the ball with a club and try to kick it into a hole on the other side
of the track. I've played it already, and the concept is pretty wacky,
I can tell you!

John Knight is a 26-year-old, drumming- and climbing-obsessed maniac
from the world's most isolated city—Perth, Western Australia. He can
usually be found either buried in an Audacity screen or thrashing a
kick-drum beyond recognition.